Filner and Weiner: Victims of Unreasonable Standards of Behavior

Do you voters ever get tired of your cruel and capricious standards?

I know you probably answered, “No! We’re the voters! We put the average random number generator to shame with our unpredictability!” Still, I have to call you out on this, because I see Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner acting like puppies who just received beatings and have no idea why. Suddenly, everyone wants them to go away, and they can’t figure out the reason.

Sure, voters think they have a reason for turning on these politicians. There are numerous accusations of Filner basically sexually assaulting women — I guess what Democrats would call “friendly fire” in the War on Women. Plus he has this smile that makes you feel like you’re being molested just by looking at it. And Weiner is this comically awful pervert who can’t seem to help sending out pictures of his crotch. Combined with his actually being named after genitalia, it’s just too much.

These two are obvious creeps who exhibit awful behavior that could only be ignored if committed by a Democrat president during a really good economy. They make you want to use hand sanitizer after watching them on CNN. But what they don’t get is why this disqualifies them from holding office in the eyes of voters, and I have to agree with them on this, because it makes absolutely no sense.

To understand the confusion about why Filner and Weiner are too awful to serve in office, let’s look at the politicians who seem to be just fine for a majority of voters. Right now, plenty of politicians are extremely incompetent, wastefully spend all our money, are arrogant and dismissive of our needs, and boss us around as if we were children, telling us what we can do and what we can eat. Judging by our bloated, overreaching, incompetent government, the average politician right now is about as awful in his professional life as can be imagined. But we’re fine with that. Our standard seems to be that a politician can be a corrupt, bungling idiot who seethes with loathing for each and every one of us… as long as he’s not a creep in his personal life.

That’s absurd.

Guessing about politicians’ personal lives based on their work performance, I’ve always just assumed there are three or four serial killers in Congress. You don’t get to $16 trillion in debt unless you have a few people involved who think it’s okay to butcher people for pleasure — that just seems like common sense. And I thought we were okay with this. But looking at the public’s recent reactions to these two politicians, I now get the sense that if a murdered prostitute were found in a senator’s car, people would be all upset by that. And Harry Reid would probably be just as confused as Filner and Weiner are now as to why we’d then want him out of office.

I’m sorry, but people can’t be this awful at their jobs without also being huge creeps in everything else; no one is that schizophrenic. People don’t seem to understand that, though. I bet if it came out that President Obama sexually harassed women, people wouldn’t believe it. “There’s no way that’s true! Sure, Obama spies on us, has basically ignored our economic needs to play around with left-wing policy, seemed unconcerned that an American consulate got overrun by terrorists and instead went after the maker of a YouTube video, sold guns to Mexican drug cartels, let the IRS target his political opponents, and forced on us a health care policy so bad you’d swear it wasn’t designed by an actual thinking person but instead by a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask, but there is no way he’d do something untoward to a woman. Blow her up without due process, sure, but not make a pass at her.”

This is incoherent thinking at best, and it seems to be a complete denial of reality. We especially shouldn’t be surprised by behavior like Filner’s and Weiner’s from Democrats; when you have creepy old guys so excited to make sure young women have cheap access to contraception and abortion, you kinda get the impression they have other intentions for these women than just “respecting” them.

So I think voters should apologize to politicians who have been victimized by these odd, incoherent standards for politicians’ behavior. If we’re going to continue electing the most awful people imaginable to wield political power and control the public’s money, it’s completely unreasonable to expect any of them to not be as horrible in every other aspect of their lives. If anything, we should cherish the ones who are more blatant about being sick perverts; I fear more the ones who are better at appearing normal, because I shudder to think what they do when we’re not watching. However, we should pass a law that if any registered politician moves into a neighborhood, he has to go door to door and announce he is one so we know to look out for him.

Oh, I guess they already do that — it’s called campaigning.